The Submission (7 page)

The governor, mysteriously absent at the onset of the controversy—awaiting the instant polls, Alyssa was sure—emerged to express “grave concern” about the possibility of a Muslim memorial-builder, not bothering with any of the mayor’s palliative liberal sentiments. Governor Bitman had the glow of a woman in love, or one who has just found an issue that could catapult her to national prominence. Alyssa, her ambitions rhyming with the governor’s, began to imagine trailing a presidential campaign from state to state.

Paul Rubin scanned the restaurant, an Upper East Side bistro he had chosen because no one he knew patronized it. All but empty, as he had hoped, except for a few matrons pickling at the dark-wood bar. Disoriented by the light-spangled mirrors on the mustard walls, he didn’t see Mohammad Khan in the long, narrow room. Then he spotted a dark-bearded man watching him from a table at the back. Paul recalled the photo that had accompanied the Garden’s submission. This couldn’t possibly be Khan. He was—Paul scrambled for the words as he approached the table—”funked up,” his wavy black hair grown longer and swept back, his jawline blurred by a neatly trimmed beard, his eyes by lightly tinted amber rectangles.

Khan stood. He had a good three inches on Paul. He had taken the seat with the view of the restaurant and the door, which was Paul’s preferred seat; sitting with his back to a room unsettled him. Once they sat, Paul sipped water, hoping to imbibe a sense of equilibrium. He noted that Khan was drinking creamed coffee the shade of his skin, then disavowed the comparison for fear it was racist.

“You look different,” he began. “From your picture.”

Khan shrugged. “It was an old picture.” He wore an uncreased white shirt of a fine fabric, the cuffs turned up, a tasteful tuft of dark hair visible at the neck. He looked like Paul’s idea of a Bollywood star. In his bow tie, Paul felt like he had overdressed for the school dance.

A moment of silence. Then another. Even in the restaurant’s dimness, even through the glasses, Khan’s eyes were—and Paul had never said this, even thought this, about a man—beautiful. Beautiful in the way marbles had been to him as a child. Beautiful in a way that women must fall hard for.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” Paul began.

“Of course, but I’m curious why I learned this from the
Post
,” Khan said. There was sketch paper in front of him, a few lines scratched on it.

Paul hesitated. “Nothing is final yet. We’re doing the due diligence required for any selection.”

“So this is part of that?”

“Yes, yes, this meeting is part of that,” Paul said. Khan’s question gave him room to maneuver.

“But I won.” He picked up his pen and began doodling. No, doodling was what Paul did. Khan was drawing. With great discomfort, Paul saw the bare outlines of the Garden materialize before him; even upside down, there was no mistaking it, the four quadrants, the canals, the walls, the trees—

“There’s no winner until the end of the process. Until the governor signs off.”

Coolly, Khan studied Paul’s face. “But the jury picked my design. It picked the Garden.”

Paul folded. He had to. “It did.”

That shimmer in Khan’s eyes: joy. It vanished behind steel gates. “So what do you need to finalize it?” he asked.

“Well, once the due diligence is complete, the public will weigh in. In fact, as you may have noticed, it already is weighing in.”

Khan didn’t take the bait. “The public,” Paul said again. “Look, we are living in difficult times, strange times—” He broke off. “Why did you enter?” he asked, surprised to be genuinely curious.

Khan looked at him as if he were a feeble old woman. “Because I could.”

“The public,” Paul said, newly fond of this vague, insistent entity, “will want a little more eloquence.”

“Of course,” Khan said, struggling—Paul could see it—to bring accommodation into his face. “My idea felt like it had the right balance between remembering and recovering. I wanted to contribute,” he added, stiffly.

Paul nodded. “As I was saying, the public is already expressing a certain amount of … agitation. Which suggests that I may have a very difficult time raising the funds to get the Garden built. Which would leave you with only a titular victory, and me with no memorial to speak of. Hardly a desirable outcome for either of us. So I’m wondering if we should come at this a little more indirectly. You work for Emmanuel Roi, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps this could proceed under his name. Which would mean you would still be working on it. You would be instrumental. Isn’t that how these practices work anyway?”

Astonishment crossed Khan’s face; anger followed, and stayed. He set down his pen, the gesture all the more unsettling for its deliberateness, and said quietly, “That’s exactly how they work, which is why I entered the fucking competition on my own.”

“So this is about your career,” Paul said.

“I must have missed the question about motives on the competition’s entry form. I want the same credit for my design as any other winner.”

“As I said, there’s no ‘winner,’ per se,” Paul said. “Not until after the public has weighed in. For now there is only the jury’s selection.”

“Fine. The same credit as any selection would get.”

“If what we’ve seen so far is a foretaste of the reaction to come, I’m not sure you’ll want credit. You may come to wish you were still anonymous.”

Khan put his long, tapered fingers to his temples and seemed to swell with irritation. “That’s my problem, isn’t it? Or is that some kind of threat?”

Paul didn’t answer. Instead he tried to summon the list of questions Lanny, after an all-night crash course in Islam, had put together for him: Sunni or Shia? Self-described moderate? Jewish girlfriend? If
they had to present a Muslim as the designer, it was critical to probe what kind of Muslim he was.

“Your background … it seems fairly secular,” Paul said. “Is that correct?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Just exploring things. If not secular, I’m sure you would describe yourself as moderate?” The fan overhead twirled in miniature in the bowl of Paul’s spoon.

“I don’t traffic in labels,” Khan said.

“Moderate’s not really a label,” Paul said. “More of an outlook. I’m a moderate myself.”

“Congratulations,” Khan said. His tone had soured. Then he seemed to reconsider. “I’m a Shia Wahhabi, if you must know,” he said.

“I see,” Paul said, taking out a pen. “Do you mind if I write that—”

Khan pushed over a blank piece of paper, waited for Paul to finish writing, then said, “I wouldn’t run to the press with that. Shias and Wahhabis are trying to kill each other, from what I know. Which isn’t much.”

Paul’s face burned as it hadn’t in a very long time. With his age, his stature, he had thought himself beyond such humiliation. He was taken back to an incident he had once revisited almost daily. He was twenty-four, a summer associate at a law firm. He had gotten there on brains and determination: always the best student in the class, awkward and shy without a book, fearful of failure or missteps. A senior partner had taken him to lunch. At the stiff, elegant restaurant, where the waiters draped white napkins over their arms, Paul toppled his glass of cranberry juice, a poor order to begin with. The partner did not ignore it, or make a kindly joke. Instead he watched the stain’s migration across the tablecloth as if menstrual blood were on the move. Then he looked straight into Paul’s eyes. To his great surprise—to this day it still surprised him—Paul looked back at the man without squirming or blushing or bothering to blot the stain. He made no eye contact with the waiter who soon rushed over to change the tablecloth in what struck Paul as an unnecessarily billowing flurry. That
endless, wordless moment taught Paul what nearly two decades of school, college, and law school had not. Brains were only half of success, maybe less; the other half was a nameless game whose coin was psychological. To win, you had to intimidate or bluff. Over the next few years, this revelation slowly freed him from himself and from a life buried in law books. He never practiced, went straight to an investment bank as a junior associate, making baby deals. He liked the game of risk. Learning that disaster could be survived, even manipulated, freed him. Khan appeared to have learned this, too. Or maybe Paul was teaching him. He wasn’t sure, today, if Paul’s humiliation of Khan or Khan’s of Paul had evoked the memory.

“You seem to think this is a game, Mr. Khan.”

“It is a game. One for which you made the rules. And now you’re trying to change them.”

“I’m changing nothing,” Paul said. “I’m doing due diligence, as I told you. The public may wonder, for example, what their memorial designer was doing in Afghanistan.” Paul hadn’t planned to bring this up, but he decided not to regret it. It would be useful to see how Khan behaved when put off-balance.

He responded with the aplomb of a well-coached judicial nominee. “I went to Afghanistan six months ago on ROI’s behalf,” he said. “We were competing to build the new American embassy there. We didn’t get it—not much of a surprise if you know ROI’s work at all. But I was glad to have the chance to see a country that’s become so important to America,” he finished smoothly.

“Then you’ll care about how important this memorial is to America,” Paul said, and with more urgency: “You won’t want to tear your country apart.”

“Of course I don’t want to tear it apart.”

“Then—it’s hard to see how this plays out any other way. If you persist.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“I’m not saying anything but what I said. I’m not saying anything except that I don’t know why anyone who loves America, wants it to
heal, would subject it to the kind of battle the selection of a Muslim would cause. Think of Solomon’s baby.”

“Shouldn’t you be making that point to the people gearing up for battle? I’ve done nothing but design a garden.”

“And they’ve done nothing but lose husbands, wives, children, parents.”

“So that gives them the moral high ground?”

“Some might say so, yes.” Paul gave a wintry smile and turned to summon the waiter.

“I could change my name,” Khan said, when Paul had finished ordering coffee.

“Many architects have,” Paul said. “Mostly Jewish ones.”

“It was a joke.”

“My great-grandfather—he was Rubinsky, then my grandfather comes to America and suddenly he’s Rubin. What’s in a name? Nothing, everything. We all self-improve, change with the times.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, picking a name that hides your roots, your origins, your ethnicity.”

“Rubin hardly hides anything.”

“It reveals less than Rubinsky. Not everyone is prepared to remake themselves to rise in America.”

Was Khan implying something about the Jews, their assimilations and aspirations? Edith’s comment from the morning came to Paul. “A Muslim country would never let a Jew build its memorial,” she said. “Why should we act differently?” Edith had a habit of voicing all the sentiments Paul never would, as if his more illiberal self had taken up residence in his apartment with him.

“This isn’t a Muslim country, Edith. We’re better than that. We can’t deny him just for being Muslim,” he had said, even though that was his plan.

“Daniel Pearl paid a much higher price for being a Jew,” she replied with airy unassailability.

Khan raised his arm. Paul flinched, then realized Khan was merely calling for the check. Paul had the disquieting sense that he had set
something new in motion without meaning to. Whatever kind of Muslim Khan was, he would leave as an angry one.

Paul arrived home ill-disposed toward his next appointment, a long-scheduled meeting with his eldest son, Jacob. He had tried to postpone. Edith wouldn’t hear of it.

These meetings were ostensibly planned for father and son to “catch up,” but really so Jacob, a mendicant with baby-soft palms, could ask for more money. Paul timed these interchanges so they wouldn’t overlap with meals. He hated the pretense of familial affection when dollars were being discussed.

Jacob called himself a filmmaker, but his films—three shorts, one feature-length that had made a few marginal festivals, then gone straight to DVD—were not ones Paul, or Paul’s friends, had heard of. Calling yourself an artist did not make you one. He was tired of financing Jacob, but Edith was always pestering him, relentless, and Paul knew they must conspire in back-channel conversations to keep the checks coming. Edith was stiff-spined, except when it came to her son.

Paul’s dispersals to Jacob left mere pockmarks in his fortune, but the presumption that there would always be more silted the flow of his generosity. To make matters worse, Jacob wore a tetchy air of mild resentment that Paul couldn’t begin to understand. He was forty and his father was bankrolling him; what could he possibly feel aggrieved about? He pushed unrealized potential before him like a baby carriage. Before investing in his son Paul had studied the economics of the film business. It was rare for independent films to make real money, and Jacob, in his black leather jacket (always the same well-cut fit and always replaced whenever it began to wear), prided himself on his anticommercialism. That meant, barring some stroke of success that his talent, so far, did not seem to herald, he would be on Paul’s dole for life. Fatherhood gave less, not more, pleasure through the years, which perhaps explained why his friends mooned over
their grandchildren: the chance to start over. Having, as yet, no grandchildren of his own, he was left with his sons, grown, along with all the usual ways, in their capacity to disappoint.

Paul’s younger son, Samuel, was a go-getter, at least. He ran a prominent gay rights organization and had been featured on the cover of
New York
magazine as one of 40 Under 40 New Yorkers to Watch. Paul did not object to his sexual preference; he had read up enough, when Samuel came out, to convince himself both that homosexuality was immutable and that he as the father was not to blame. But he hated having it flaunted, hated the endless stream of interchangeable young men brought to Passover and Thanksgiving. “You want me to live like I’m straight,” Samuel had accused him once. This was exactly right. Paul couldn’t quite surmount his perplexity that it was Jacob who was the washout.